The Scholarly CommonsCopyright (c) 2017 Cornell University School of Hotel Administration All rights reserved.http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu
Recent documents in The Scholarly Commonsen-usThu, 17 Aug 2017 01:48:39 PDT3600Innovating Across Senior Living and Care: Insights from 2017 CIHF Senior Living Roundtablehttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cihfcoll/5
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cihfcoll/5Fri, 11 Aug 2017 07:39:42 PDT
The second Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures (CIHF) roundtable, held in March 2017, brought together senior-level executives, educators, and leaders in senior housing and care to share experiences and exchange ideas. CIHF roundtables are purposely limited to approximately 25 to 30 participants “at the table” to foster discussion on a more intimate basis than traditional conferences. In addition to the formal participants, students, faculty, and guests observed and interacted during the event and attended a separate panel discussion and reception the evening before. Students, faculty, and industry leaders also met together at a working luncheon session to brainstorm ideas for recruiting and training young talent for careers in the senior housing and care industry.
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Sherrie NegreaMulti-Click Attribution in Sponsored Search Advertising: An Empirical Study in Hospitality Industryhttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1036
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1036Mon, 07 Aug 2017 06:03:05 PDT
Sponsored search advertising has become a dominant form of advertising for many firms in the hospitality vertical, with Priceline and Expedia each spending in excess of US$2 billion in online advertising in 2015. Given the competition in online advertising, it has become essential for advertisers to know how effectively to allocate financial resources to keywords. Central to budget allocation for keywords is an attribution of revenue (from converted ads) to the keywords generating consumer interest. Conventional wisdom suggests several ways to attribute revenues in the sponsored search advertising domain (e.g., last-click, first & last-click, or evenly distributed approach). We develop a multi-click attribution methodology using a unique multi-advertiser data set, which includes full advertiser and consumer-level click and purchase information. We add to the literature by developing a two-stage multi-click attribution methodology with a specific focus on sponsored search advertising in the hospitality industry with which we develop a parametric approach to calculate the value function from each stage of the estimation process. Given our multi-advertiser data set, we are able to illustrate the inefficiency of single-click attribution approaches, which undervalue assist clicks while overvaluing converted clicks.
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Chris K. Anderson et al.Replicating and Extending Our Understanding of How Managers Can Adjust the “Warm Glow Thermostat”http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1035
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1035Mon, 07 Aug 2017 06:03:00 PDT
This article presents four studies that replicate and extend a recent article examining how guest participation in voluntary green programs (e.g., towel reuse) increases service satisfaction by evoking a “warm glow” response. Importantly for managers, we not only replicate across new hospitality and service contexts but also conceptualize alternative incentive paradigms, and test alternative mediators. In particular, we reconceptualize the “self-benefiting” versus “other-benefiting” incentive structure presented by Giebelhausen, Chun, Cronin, and Hult to consider “virtue,” “vice,” and “cash” incentives (i.e., three different types of self-benefiting incentives). The results provide managers with a better understanding of how they should promote and reward sustainable guest behavior. In addition to managerial implications, the present research also contributes to the academic literature on a growing phenomenon that has important implications for both business and society at large.
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Michael D. Giebelhausen et al.More Multi-Study Articles Wantedhttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1034
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1034Mon, 07 Aug 2017 06:02:54 PDT
[Excerpt] Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (CQ) readers may have noticed that the lead article for this issue and for each of the previous two issues has been a multi-study paper. The lead article for the next issue of CQ will also be a multi-study paper, and this will be true for future issues as long as I have enough accepted multi-study papers to make it so. I want to use this editorial to explain my preference for multi-study articles and to encourage CQ authors to write and submit more of them.
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Michael LynnSummary of CQ’s 2016 Submissions and Editorial Decisionshttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1033
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1033Mon, 07 Aug 2017 06:02:49 PDT
[Excerpt] In 2016, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (CQ) received 280 new submissions with 271 receiving editorial decisions within the year. Twenty-five submissions were accepted for publication last year. Some of the new submissions are still under invited revision and some of the acceptances were of manuscripts originally submitted in 2015, so dividing 25 by 271 to get an acceptance rate is not fully appropriate, but it does provide a reasonable approximation of the journal’s acceptance rate. By that calculation, CQ’s acceptance rate is 9%. Other, more complicated but arguably more appropriate calculations put the journal’s acceptance rate at 10%. Seventy-five percent of submissions were desk-rejected—usually within 3 days of submission. Of those new submissions sent out to review, the average time until initial editorial decisions was 31 days. No revisions and resubmissions (R&Rs) were sent back to the reviewers last year, so the average time until an editorial decision on R&Rs was less than 3 days. More details about last year’s submissions and editorial decisions are provided in Tables 1 and 2.
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Michael LynnThe Effect of Cost of Living on Employee Wages in the Hospitality Industryhttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1032
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1032Mon, 07 Aug 2017 06:02:43 PDT
This study examines the effect of cost of living (COL) on employee wages in the hotel industry. Although prior research clearly indicates that COL and wages are positively related, there is a lack of research explicitly considering the specific nature of the relationship between COL and wages, and potential moderators to the relationship. Using a dataset containing information on 97 jobs over 67 cities, our study shows that while there is a positive effect of COL on wages, the adjustment is not equal in magnitude to the difference that the COL levels would indicate. Furthermore, the effect of COL decreases as the average wage for the given job increases. We also show differences in COL’s effects for full-service versus limited-service hotels. We illustrate the implications of our findings by showing predicted wage rates for four jobs in five different cities, at both full-service and limit-service hotels. The study has implications for research, particularly for future work on COL and compensation. The findings also have important implications for practice, and may be particularly useful when managers need to set pay levels when local market data are unavailable.
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Michael C. Sturman et al.Not Merely a Matter of Drawing Arrows: The Empirical Consequences of Measurement Model Specification and Recommendations for Practicehttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1031
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1031Mon, 07 Aug 2017 06:02:36 PDT
Understanding measurement model specification is especially important for hospitality research due to its cross-disciplinary nature and the prevalence of measures used in the field which are often central to the formative versus reflective debate (e.g., SERVQUAL, socioeconomic status). The current study contributes to this topic by providing empirically based prescriptive advice to drive better measurement model specification. Specifically, the decision-making procedures developed by this study can complement theoretical reasons for a model choice as well as help determine a correct model choice when theories are equivocal or non-existent. This study combines actual and simulated data to show that model fit statistics alone cannot determine which model specification is correct, but also that a correct measurement model will generate more accurate predictions within a model which in turn will offer more accurate managerial recommendations.
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Elisa K. Chan et al.The Effects of Service Charges versus Service-included Pricing on Deal Perceptionhttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1030
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1030Fri, 04 Aug 2017 08:50:36 PDT
Study participants rated menu prices with an automatic percentage service gratuity as better deals than equivalent service-included prices when the service component of price was below the standard 15 percent tipping rate. However, the reverse was true when the service component of price was above 15 percent. Furthermore, a move from percentage service gratuity toward dollar service gratuity impeded participants’ menu price judgment. These findings provide some insights regarding which pricing alternative to tipping should be implemented if and when restaurateurs decide to abandon voluntary tipping.
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Shuo Wang et al.Institutional Ownership and Return Predictability Across Economically Unrelated Stockshttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1029
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1029Fri, 04 Aug 2017 08:50:29 PDT
We document strong weekly lead-lag return predictability across stocks from different industries with no customer-supplier linkages (economically unrelated stocks). Between 1980 and 2010, the industry-neutral long-short hedge portfolio earns an average of over 19 basis points per week. This predictability is related to common institutional ownership and is distinct from previously documented lead-lag effects. Common institutional ownership is a complementary rather than a substitute explanation for return predictability. Information linkages are enough to induce return predictability among stocks in the same industry, but economically unrelated stocks exhibit return predictability only when they have common institutional owners. Our findings suggest that institutional portfolio reallocations can induce return predictability among otherwise unrelated stocks.
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George P. Gao et al.Real Assets, Liquidation Value and Choice of Financinghttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1028
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1028Fri, 04 Aug 2017 08:50:21 PDT
We use real estate firms to examine how asset liquidation values influence a firm’s financing choice, because the productivity and quality of each asset is observable and potential measures of an asset’s liquidation value are easier to ascertain ex ante. We show that compared to firms that issue equity, firms that issue debt have higher asset quality. The effect of their expected asset liquidation value is significant, even after we control for other factors that influence financing decisions. For firms whose assets’ quality is not easily observable, we find that firms’ financing choices depend heavily on conditions in the overall real estate market.
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Crocker H. Liu et al.Fundamental Drivers of Dependence in REIT Returnshttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1027
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1027Fri, 04 Aug 2017 08:50:13 PDT
We analyse the empirical relationships between firm fundamentals and the dependence structure between individual REIT and stock market returns. In contrast to previous studies, we distinguish between the average systematic risk of REITs and their asymmetric risk in the sense of a disproportionate likelihood of joint negative return clusters between REITs and the stock market. We find that REITs with low systematic risk are typically small, with low short-term momentum, low turnover, high growth opportunities and strong long-term momentum. Holding systematic risk constant, the main driving forces of asymmetric risk are leverage and, to some extent, short-term momentum. Specifically, we find that leverage has an asymmetric effect on REIT return dependence that outweighs the extent to which it increases the average sensitivity of REIT equity to market fluctuations, explaining the strong negative impact of leverage on firm performance especially during crisis periods that has been documented in recent empirical work.
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Jamie Alcock et al.Unexpected Inflation, Capital Structure And Real Risk-Adjusted Firm Performancehttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1026
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1026Fri, 04 Aug 2017 08:50:04 PDT
Managers can improve real risk-adjusted firm performance by matching nominal assets with nominal liabilities, thereby reducing the sensitivity of real risk-adjusted returns to unexpected inflation. The Net Asset Value (NAV) of US equity Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) serves as a good proxy for nominal assets and accordingly we use a sample of US REITs to test our hypothesis. We find that for the firms in our sample: (i) their real, risk-adjusted performance, and (ii) their inflation hedging qualities are inversely related to deviations from this “matching-nominals" argument. In addition to providing managers with a vehicle to maximise real, risk-adjusted performance, our findings also provide investors with the tools to infer inflation-hedging qualities of equity investments.
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Jamie Alcock et al.Second Quarter 2017: Positive Momentum Continues: A New Price High Reachedhttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cremi/23
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cremi/23Tue, 01 Aug 2017 14:11:26 PDT
Our moving average trendlines, supported by our Standardized Unexpected Price (SUP) performance metrics, indicate not only positive price momentum but also that a statistically significant new high has been reached this quarter.

Forward looking indicators suggest that this momentum should continue into the next quarter. Further good news is that lenders are not demanding higher compensation for risk associated with hotel loans relative to other commercial real estate loans. However, the total risk of hotel REITs relative to the total risk of equity REITs as a whole continues to rise. This means that lenders will eventually start to tighten hotel lending standards or demand more compensation for risk in terms of higher interest rates for hotel loans. This is report number 23 of the index series.

Supplemental File: Hotel Valuation Model (HOTVAL) We provide this user friendly hotel valuation model in an excel spreadsheet entitled HOTVAL Toolkit as a complement to this report which is available for download from http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/creftools/1/

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Crocker H. Liu et al.Sex Trafficking: The Hospitality Industry’s Role and Responsibilityhttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/honorstheses/3
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/honorstheses/3Fri, 28 Jul 2017 11:15:28 PDT
This research explores the issue of sex trafficking in hotels within the United States. Research was conducted regarding the prevalence of the issue, legal implications for hotels, resources available and current initiatives taken by companies. Surveys and interviews were conducted to identify the overall sentiments of hoteliers on the issue and potential solutions suggested by agencies that work against trafficking. The research identifies a strong need for training and increased awareness among hotels.
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Giovanna L. C. CavagnaroThe Implications of Bank Loyalty Card Programs for Hotel Ownershttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/honorstheses/2
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/honorstheses/2Fri, 28 Jul 2017 11:15:22 PDT
This thesis looks into hotel loyalty programs and the relationships between the involved players: hotel brands, hotels, guests, and financial institutions (co-branded credit card partners). Past studies have been conducted around loyalty programs structures and their associated value to guests. To better understand the intricacies of loyalty programs, phone interviews were conducted with industry professionals. This thesis examines the business relationships of the industry players and the flow of loyalty points. Hotel owners emerge as the net losers from the expansion and growth of these loyalty programs.
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Bethany HuanAn Investigation of the Natural Vacancy Rate in the Hong Kong Lodging Markethttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/honorstheses/1
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/honorstheses/1Fri, 28 Jul 2017 11:15:16 PDT
Knowing the natural vacancy rate of a real estate market can yield highly useful information regarding future price movements. Past studies have been conducted to predict natural vacancy rates for office properties, but little research has delved into natural vacancy rates for the lodging market, and even less so within Hong Kong. This study aims to provide an estimate for the natural vacancy rate in the Hong Kong lodging market from 2008 to 2016 by using previous rent adjustment models, and also to predict whether the structural rate has changed over time.
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Jonathan WaiThe Effect of Corporate Acquisitions on Stockholder Returns in the Lodging Industryhttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/workingpapers/31
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/workingpapers/31Fri, 28 Jul 2017 11:04:33 PDT
We examine the stock market’s reaction to merger announcements in the lodging industry over the 1982-2000 period. Unlike the results for the overall market, we find that both the stockholders of the acquiring and target firms gain at the time of the merger announcement. In the lodging industry, mergers are positive net present value investments for bidders. Whereas for the overall market, merger bids are at the best zero net present value investments. In addition, we found that shareholders benefit from mergers in the short- (one year), medium (three year) and long-term (five-year). Lastly, the wealth gains to tender offers and significantly greater than the wealth gains to mergers for both the portfolio of target and acquiring firms.
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Linda CaninaProblem-based Learning in Graduate Management Education: An Integrative Model and Interdisciplinary Applicationhttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1025
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1025Fri, 28 Jul 2017 10:50:33 PDT
This article develops a model of problem-based learning (PBL) and shows how PBL has been used for a decade in one graduate management program. PBL capitalizes on synergies among cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning. Although management education usually privileges cognitive learning, affective learning is equally important. By focusing on real-world problems, PBL helps students appreciate multiple perspectives, recognize nonrational elements of decision making, and confront ethical quandaries. Together, cognitive and affective learning underpin the essential third element: behavioral learning about how to implement plans, lead teams, resolve conflict, persuade others, and communicate with multiple constituencies. Specific examples of PBL projects illustrate this interrelationship.
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Judi Brownell et al.Women in Hospitality Management: General Managers’ Perceptions of Factors Related to Career Developmenthttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1024
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1024Fri, 28 Jul 2017 10:50:26 PDT
A descriptive study was undertaken to learn more about women’s career development in the hospitality industry from general managers’ perspectives. The primary purpose of the study was to identify the communication skills and job-related activities that were perceived to have contributed most significantly to individuals’ advancement, and to determine any differences between men’s and women’s perceptions regarding the most essential competencies and behaviors for advancement in the hospitality industry. Both groups rated the significance of eight potential obstacles to women’s career development. Demographic information was gathered to determine whether significant differences existed between the samples of men and women.

The samples of both men and women ranked listening competence as the most important communication skill for career advancement in the hospitality industry, followed by group leadership skills. Perceptions regarding the behaviors and/or circumstances that contributed to career development were also similar between the two groups; both ranked (1) hard work, (2) a positive attitude and (3) communication effectiveness as the three most essential items. The only significant difference between the two groups was with regard to the role mentoring played in mens’ and womens’ career development.

The relative ranking of various obstacles to women’s career development was similar between the samples of men and women; however, significant differences existed in the degree to which each group felt these items posed a problem to women in hospitality management.

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Judi BrownellHospitality Managers’ Communication Practiceshttp://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1023
http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/articles/1023Fri, 28 Jul 2017 10:50:19 PDT
Recent research confirms that skill in oral and written communication is essential to effective management practice. Little is known, however, about the specific communication activities hospitality managers perform on the job. This study explores managers’ perceptions of the frequency and difficulty of various organizational communication relationships and specific communication activities. Comparisons are made between the perceptions of middle and general managers in the hospitality industry with regard to individual and organizational communication practices. The results of this research have implications for practitioners, educators, and consultants as they work to improve the communication competence of hospitality managers.
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Judi Brownell